Overdrive Magazine | Trucking Business News & Owner Operator Info
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/490954
30 | Overdrive | April 2015 ON-DEMAND LOAD MATCHING from the supply chain,' " Tsybaev says, but that's not the reality. The goal is simply to "optimize the experience" in his case, for the independent. In truckload, Uberization may be more buzzword than reality. Established players slowly have capitalized on tech- VWTWOa\WQUXZW^MMٻKQMVKaQVNZMQOP\ transactions – and with that, crucial critical mass. Landstar's huge network of independent agents and owner-op- erators, in-house online and mobile-op- timized load board and self-dispatch model come to mind. In the spot market, brokerages such as C.H. Robinson, TQL and others likewise have built proprietary mobile apps to streamline operators' connec- tions to their freight universes. The Sylectus transportation management software enables collaborative freight sharing among carriers. Also, longtime stalwarts of owner-op- erator load matching continue to opti- mize load-board systems for marketing opportunity, real-time rate and demand data availability and streamlined func- tionality in general. Still, some corners of the truckload world are "back in the '90s or early 2000s" when it comes to technology, Tsybaev says, with too much still happen- ing on paper and over the phone. "This multiplies middlemen in the industry who increase the transportation costs to ship- XMZ[IVLLMKZMI[M\PM\Z]KSMZ[¼XZWÅ\[º Tsybaev points to the prevalence not of brokers but services such as indepen- dent dispatchers, often a necessity for the owner-operator in today's negotia- tion-heavy spot market. The future, he says, will see an independent own- er-operator business model that "won't work with dispatchers as much." As it is today, "we had several guys who com- pared working with the dispatcher and without. They did some calculations." Due to the sometimes cumbersome nature of truckload freight matching \WLIa¹Q\¼[[\QTTUWZMJMVMÅKQIT_WZSQVO with the dispatcher, even with his fee." Thayne Boren, Internet Truckstop mobile-tech general manager, says a lot of brokers his company works with "don't have a mobile strategy per se." ITS increasingly is becoming the connec- tion engine for such entities to cement uShip has emerged as one of the more suc- cessful trucking entities that early in its history leaned heavily on the In- ternet to bring individu- al, often noncommercial parties together to fill each other's transporta- tion needs. Changes that developed last year moved the (mostly) small-freight marketplace toward a more Uber-like model. "uShip was 'sharing economy' before that term even existed," said Matt Chasen, uShip chief executive officer, in an interview last year, invoking the old "peer-to-peer network" terminology. "To this day, we have a signifi- cant amount of our business that is average people that are taking road trips in small trucks that connect with people that need to ship things through a noncommercial sort of operation" – things that "otherwise there's no way to move at reasonable cost." But with the rise in mobile technology, Chasen called uShip.com's reverse-auction format "more or less dying or dead." The reason: transactional friction. All the time and effort spent bidding for transporters and receiving bids for shippers was too much. Today, updates have been made. Shippers in various uShip categories are seeing options for algorithmic pricing based on historic rates in certain uShip lanes. In that structure, if transporters do not accept a shipper's initial offer, the price then begins to creep up until someone does. Carriers are seeing pressure from the sys- tem to activate an option for location sharing. This gives shippers visibility into the uShip mobile app's users' approximate location in transit and also can serve a marketing purpose in broadcasting availability to match with nearby loads. Soon, carriers that don't enable location sharing will find use of the pri- mary uShip.com platform limited in some ways. Chasen envisions tomorrow's trucker as what he calls the "little LTL" – an independent hotshot who uses such on-demand platforms to "help them maximize utilization of the asset" with a multiplicity of side opportunities. Given the mix of professional interstate haulers and noncommercial drivers Chasen mentions above on uShip, Overdrive readers have worried over the years that such "sharing economy" platforms open the door to entities unqualified to engage in interstate hauling. Such competition for freight puts those for whom compliance is a business expense at a disadvantage, with the potential then to depress rates in related markets. While it's no secret many qualified carriers have found freight-matching utility from the uShip system, those worries were foreground- ed during the reporting of this story. During routine fact-checking of an early March inter- view with a Texas-based hotshot owner-op- erator about then-ongoing use of the uShip. com freight marketplace to load his interstate business, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration confirmed the owner-operator's authority officially was inactive. The business, officials said, had been placed out of service more than a year ago, following failure to complete a New Entrant audit, in February 2014. While uShip.com offers SaferWatch verifi- cation of authority as a service to carriers to prove compliance to individual shippers and strengthen their business profiles in the sys- tem, it does not require it for those loading through the system. USHIP'S VISION FOR MOBILE-DRIVEN 'LITTLE LTL' " I'm always skep- tical of taking the power of negotia- tion out of the hands of the parties. " — DAT Senior Vice President Ken Harper